Introduction

This chapter contributes to restoring the discursive connections linking China's modern architectural, connections that were damaged and often broken during the second half of the twentieth century, and to advance understanding of China's encounter with architecture as a distinct modern art practice. While the subject of architecture, the notion of modernity and the context of China pose no exceptional analytical problems individually, the same cannot be said when considered collectively. In an attempt to address such deficiency, this interdisciplinary study is located at the confluence of architecture, modernity and China. Architecturally, the aim is to expand knowledge about the evolution of the profession in China up to 1949 and thus to contribute to improving China's comparative under-representation in the historiography of modern architecture globally. Recognition of the paradox is an essential precondition to exploring China's encounter with modernity and architecture in the first half of the twentieth century and consequently determines this study's structure, which forms modernity and architecture.